Jan. 31, 1961: A Chimp Named Ham Spaces Out

1961: A little fellow named Ham (for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, his place of training) hitches a ride on the Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket to become the first chimp in outer space. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to follow Ham’s lead, did so just two and a half months later.

But this was no leisure tour for Ham. There was work to be done — specifically, to see if chimps, and by close genetic association, humans, had slower reaction times in space. Ham, whose vitals were closely monitored by NASA techs on the ground, went 157 miles into the sky with a simple mission: to tug on levers when corresponding lights flashed.

If Ham did not pull the lever within five seconds of the light flashing, he received an electric shock on the soles of his feet. If he made it in time, he received a banana-flavored pellet, which, though clichéd, is an inevitable dietary preference of chimps. And Ham performed quite well, even in zero-gravity. His reaction times were only slightly slower in space than they had been on Earth.

This “frisky space-traveler,” as he was so lovingly dubbed in a newsreel at the time, spent 16 minutes from lift-off at Cape Canaveral to touch-down in the Atlantic Ocean, where his capsule was picked up by a helicopter and deposited on a ship. There, he shook hands with the crew and underwent a physical exam, which determined that he had only suffered a bruised nose.

Though he had demonstrated great bravery, reaching some 157 miles higher in the sky than King Kong ever bothered to climb, this was to be Ham’s first and only mission. He spent the rest of his life in zoos, receiving fan mail and occasionally appearing on TV, before dying in 1983 at the age of 26. In 1998 a forensic anthropologist, apparently looking to corner the market for replica chimp pelvises, took a cast of that part of Ham’s skeleton and started selling reproductions. So for only $149 you can own a piece of space history in a very weird way.